Crazy Like Us
On sale
24th March 2011
Price: £10.99
It is well-known that US culture is a dominant force and a world-wide phenomenon. But it is possible that its most troubling export has yet to be accounted for?
America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories: it exports psychopharmaceuticals and categorises disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health. The outcome of these efforts is just now coming to light: it turns out that the US has not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness — it has been changing the mental illnesses themselves.
Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is the US: as Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses are introduced, they are is fact spreading the diseases and shaping, if not creating, the mental illnesses of our time.
America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories: it exports psychopharmaceuticals and categorises disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health. The outcome of these efforts is just now coming to light: it turns out that the US has not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness — it has been changing the mental illnesses themselves.
Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is the US: as Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses are introduced, they are is fact spreading the diseases and shaping, if not creating, the mental illnesses of our time.
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Reviews
Crazy Like Us is a blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America's role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing.
Compelling.
"Searing, startling, and utterly unforgettable. Ethan Watters brilliantly surveys the stark interior cost of globalization, from our export of stress disorders to Sri Lanka to our marketing of depression in Japan as 'a cold of the soul.' Crazy Like Us is a grand tour of the new global psyche, distorted and darkened by the export of the American dream."
Ethan Watters has traveled the world to look at how globalization reaches far beyond economics and into people's very conceptions of what constitutes health and sanity. I find his book provocative, original, and convincing.
A chilling, cautionary tale.
I couldn't put it down. Crazy Like Us is a fascinating and provocative intellectual travelogue, and Watters is a fearless guide.
Crazy Like Us is both groundbreaking and shocking...
...in addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses...[Watters] is on to something worth pondering.